ANALYSIS

World Cup 2026: the saddest neighborhood in New York

July 20, 2026

Every time a team went out of the 2026 World Cup, a New York neighborhood took it personally. A daily grief index across 205 neighborhoods, built from Census foreign-born data.

Scrub the timeline to see which neighborhoods grieved as their teams went out.

loading the ledger…

How to read it: one person-grief unit is one foreign-born New Yorker from an eliminated country, weighted by how far their team got and how cruelly it went out, fading with a four-day half-life-ish decay (τ = 4 days). Foreign-born population is a proxy for fandom — the best one the Census offers, and we treat it as exactly that. Per-capita view divides by neighborhood population (neighborhoods under 2,000 residents sit out that view). Sources: ACS 2023 five-year, table B05006; 2020 NTA boundaries, NYC Open Data.